A drive reports its Advanced Format capabilities via the ATA Identify Device command.
See these threads for examples:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/WD20EARS-Windows-7-partitioning-and-formatting/m-p/181530#M5325
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Internal-Drives/WD3200BEKT-Dell-E6410-Win7-x64-sp1-slow-disk/td-p/194226
The following thread explains how to access your drive’s Identify Device data in Linux:
http://forum.hddguru.com/need-read-hdd-identify-data-t17036.html
